Large-scale context-aware system in smart spaces: Issues and challenges

Smart spaces are characterised by availability of information from digital artifacts embedded in the environment and network services that unobtrusively enhance our interaction with the digital world. User and environment context plays a vital role in deciding the usability of information services available in a smart space. Making this context available and coordinating it across the network, geographic and administrative boundaries of individual smart spaces are significant challenges that have not been adequately addressed in existing context-aware systems. We discuss various facets of this challenge and present an architecture based on federation of context brokers for large-scale context dissemination in smart spaces.